B-b-b-Buckethead

We made the trek down to B.B. King’s in Times Square yesterday to see Buckethead. Buckethead is a pretty amazing guitar player, I would say he could hold his own with the guitar greats. He wears a mask and a bucket on his head (think KFC chicken bucket, but during the show he just wore a plain white bucket). His style ranges from likes of Eric Johnson, to metal, to bizarre experimental. Some samples here and here. He can play very fast using lots of hammer-on / pull-off and exceptional picking. He experienced some technical difficulties near the beginning of the show but he hardly flinched. While his stage hands worked to solve the problems, he just took the time to do some of his odd dancing and demonstrate his nunchuk skills. About mid-concert he took a break to hand out toys from a plastic bag to the people at the front of the crowd and even took a few gifts from his fans.

All told, it was a really amazing concert, but it is odd that while he doesn’t have any sort of backup band, he doesn’t play alone. There was generally an accompanying audio track of drums and guitar which he played along with. Several times when he wanted to stop and dance, etc. he would just walk over to his iPod and play some music.

Unfortunately, the concert ended early because the technical difficulties came back and they weren’t able to resolve the issue, but he was on stage for about 90 minutes so it wasn’t too big a deal.

Slackin’

Sorry, I’ve been slackin’ on the blog. Since last we spoke, I’ve started and finished [round 1 of] Dead Space which is a really fun horror themed space shooter (think Aliens / Event Horizon in a video game). Ground-breaking UI, fun gameplay, great weapons, amazing sound, top notch graphics. I highly recommend it.

I picked up Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, which the missus and I are playing a bit. I’ll talk more about Viva later after we have played more of it – hopefully it won’t fall by the wayside as the first Viva did, we both enjoyed the first Viva game but just stopped playing it for no good reason (well, my reason was the first gears  came out, I believe. Gears of War 2 comes out soon).

This weekend, we both started playing Fable II. The missus generally sticks to puzzle, board, or Piñata games, but I think given the relatively easy to master controls she might give Fable II a chance. I am a probably 5 – 10 hours into Fable II and while I think a better “World Map” and the ability to occasionally find loot and items from dead enemies would be a nice additions, my impression (so far) is that Fable II is a very solid Action-RPG. The graphics are very nice, the sounds is good, gameplay is fun. The NPCs (non-player charactes, the “other folks” in the game) have fun lines and are entertaining to interact with.  The addition of a “golden path” (which was also in Dead Space) is really nice and keeps me from having to continually flip over to a map screen – I hope more games introduce this “golden path” system. The dog in Fable II is a great addition and works really well. The last big Action-RPG I played was Oblivion and this feels like a bit like a more polished, more guided, but smaller scoped Oblivion. I think they have the controls nearly nailed. The only problem I have is that when you are around NPCs if you accidentally press X/Y/B on the controller you will pull out a weapon and scare them. As other games commonly use Y for “info” or B to “stop interactions”, I keep accidentally pressing these. No big deal, I’ll learn eventually – it is just my muscle memory thwarting me. If you are an Action-RPG game fan you might be asking yourself “Fable II or Fallout 3” and I don’t yet have an answer. I plan to play both, but decided to start with Fable II because (a) it is a shorter game and (b) it came out a week earlier. After I play Fallout 3 I’ll post my verdict, but that may not be until sometime in December.

We went to see Body of Lies with a friend this weekend. It was a very interesting movie about a CIA agent stationed in the middle east starring Leonardo DiCaprio and a rotund Russell Crowe. To me, DiCaprio did a better job in this movie than Crowe (which is an oddity for Crowe, he’ll usually the movie stealer). If you see the trailer and the movie intrigues you, go see it, you’ll likely enjoy it. We recently re-watched A Beautiful Mind, which was as good as I remembered. If you somehow missed it, add it to your Netflix queue.

We are continuing to enjoy Netflix for new movies AND if something is in the theater that we don’t think we’ll make it out to see, I just do a  “Save It” for the film and it will appear in my queue once it is released on DVD (this is even true for movies that haven’t come out in the theater, yet). We’ve also been using Netflix to re-watch old movies (like A Beautiful Mind) and old TV shows (Night Court and Laugh In are coming soon, I believe), which is a lot of fun. If you have an Xbox 360 (with a “Gold” Xbox Live subscription) and Netflix, starting November 19th with the fall dashboard update you will be able to watch Netflix “Watch Instantly” movies and TV shows right from the Xbox 360, which we are excited about. My “Watch Instantly” queue is getting quite large in anticipation of this.

Scuba Jane, Fo’ Reals! and Dexter

The missus and I spent the weekend at Dutch Springs so she could do her certification dives, which were broken down into two days – three dives on Saturday and one dive on Sunday. She did a fantastic job but after three dives she was really wiped out (which is normal, diving is hard work plus when your learning it takes a lot of mental work, too). I dove with Alex, a “dive master in training,” who showed me more of underwater Dutch Springs than I got to see on the trip I took there two years ago. A few of us did underwater pumpkin carving, which was fun (I did it twice before at Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, NM). The second day was a lot lighter with just one dive. We talked about doing a second dive on Sunday, but she was still pretty tired from Saturday’s dives. We picked up Dutch Springs 2009 season passes, so we can dive and camp there from now through March, 2008 2010 – so we hope to do a lot of underwater exploration. I am looking forward to doing more diving in this next year. Predictably, some underwater pictures on flickr. She is now a fully certified Open Water dive. Yay!

I am half way through Dexter – Season 2. I watched most of season 1 and read Darkly Dreaming Dexter, both of which I enjoyed but missed out watching season two until recently. It’s a fun show with a dark sense of humor.

Scuba Jane, RSN

The missus has finished her scuba pool work. During her final pool class, I did a quick “skills refresher” partially because I haven’t been diving as much lately and partially just to get in the pool to watch the class. In past weeks I had some medium-quality pics from above the water. This week I have some medium-quality pics from under the water. The picture quality isn’t great for several reasons including: I didn’t have the white balance set quite right at the beginning, the pool was a touch murky, the lighting in there is really weird, and because I wanted to keep a good distance between the class and me as to not disturb them.

She still has to do her “open water” certification dives at Dutch Springs in a week or so at which time I am planning to do some diving myself – I think I have somebody lined up who I can dive with. While I think she was apprehensive about diving at the start, I think she’s now having fun with it and is excited to do her open water dives and the upcoming vacation diving (I may make an avid diver out of her yet). I am looking foward to sharing the underwater world with her.

Is Pure the new SSX?

After playing the demo, I picked up Pure for the Xbox 360. Pure as an ATV racing game with a strong emphasis on tricks. People who like racing games strictly for racing probably won’t enjoy pure, but if you want to race AND pull lots of crazy tricks this game might be the game for you. When I saw Pure was published by Disney I nearly didn’t even try the demo, thinking it must be some silly kids game – but I was wrong about this.

My primary motivation for getting Pure was that it ‘feels’ a bit like playing SSX. If you aren’t familiar with the SSX series, it is a fast-paced snowboard racing and tricks game (such as with this video). SSX 3 and SSX On Tour also support “free riding,” which is snowboarding with tricks but not racing (such as with this video). In SSX 3 and SSX On Tour you can pick the part of the mountain and just ride down, but on the way you will see different events (races, freestyle events, etc.) that you can participate in. The longest race in SSX On Tour goes from the top of the mountain all the way down to the bottom and can easily take 15 minutes. SSX is one of my favorite game series, but sadly they haven’t released (or even mentioned) a game since SSX On Tour in 2005. I keep hoping EA will remedy this and release an SSX game on the Xbox 360.

Pure will satisfies some of my SSX urges, but it falls a bit short on a few specifics. While I haven’t played all of the tracks yet, the tracks I have played so far lack the verticality that I loved in SSX. There are some drops in SSX that feel like hundreds of feet – this allows for some massive tricks. While hundreds of feet may be an exaggeration, so far Pure doesn’t yet offer the same speed or tricking opportunities. This very well may change as I get further into Pure. I hope so!

The second and slightly larger problem is that the Pure “tracks” are more defined than the SSX tracks. SSX in general feels more “open”, if you can see a shortcut down the side of a hill, you can take it. In Pure if you see a shortcut and try to take it, often it will think you went off the track and will penalize you  by “resetting” you back onto the track. This can move you from a high ranking position (say, first place) and drop you to way down in the ranks. I’ve gone from first or second to 15th or 16th just because of mistakes such as this — what a drag. Also track related, they like to put boulders and such at the borders of the track. If you turn slightly late and hit a boulder, it doesn’t see this as a problem and “reset” you back onto the track, it makes you reverse and get back onto the track, which may kill your position in the race. This is understandable in a “normal” racing game, but in the high speed tricks game that Pure is, it should detect the inability to proceed forward and “reset” you back onto the track, like SSX does. Finally, I loved the ability in SSX to press the “back” button on the controller and have it “reset” me if I veered way off the course but the game hadn’t detected it yet. This feature just doesn’t exist in Pure.

It will be interesting to see how Pure has more vertical drops in later games. The major difference between racing in Pure and SSX is many races in SSX are best of three races instead of having “laps”. In Pure, the races really are laps and a race has 3 or more laps, so if you have an exceptionally bad lap you might as well just restart the race. Because the lap must end where it started, any long vertical drops require that much vertical climb. I imagine this will hinder Pure from having the super-long vertical drops that SSX has.

One other feature I miss from SSX (at least I haven’t encountered it in Pure, yet) is that many of the SSX races have multiple paths. In Pure I have seen some slight path variations but they all tend to quickly merge back together. This may be different in later levels.

So, I’ve pointed out my “problems” with Pure, but what are its strengths? The ATVs are incredibly customizable, which will be fun for people who like to endlessly tweak their vehicles. As you progress through the game you get lots of new parts and upgrades. This will likely make going back to earlier races more fun. All of the SSX games had similar customizability with the different boards, but Pure tons of options. Secondly, the graphics are incredibly nice. The control of the game, for this kind of game, is spot on. The racing is very arcade-y — you don’t have to spend all of your time carefully managing gas and brake – gas and less gas (and steering and tricks) is generally all you have to worry about.

The sound on pure is generally good. It seems to have quite a few good music tracks, but on the long races the music just seems to disappear, which is odd. It shoudl either look or start a new song. It seems the music in Pure is really a secondary thing. SSX had such a focus on great music that Pure feels lacking in the music department. One other complaint with Pure’s sound is that Pure seems to have a very limited amount of “taunts” that come from the other racers. The SSX racers (especially in SSX Tricky) were known characters – when Zoe got mad at you, Zoe would harass you as you passed her or she passed you. While SSX didn’t have a huge number of phrases from the other characters, Pure seems to have very few taunts and the other racers in Pure are all anonymous. You tend to hear the same 3 or 4 things over and over; I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard “do you know who I am”. I understand Disney wanted to make this game kid friendly, but the taunts just add nothing to the game after the first 20 times you’ve heard them,.

So, do I like Pure? In general, yes. Pure is a fun game and I want to get farther into it, but Pure doesn’t even come close to filling the SSX void in my soul. I’ll play more Pure, but I’ll  keep hoping for another SSX game. Some may say it isn’t fair to so directly compare Pure and SSX, but I think they released a game in what is essentially the same genere so the comparison is appropriate.

Movies, Diving, a Book

We saw two movies this last weekend. The first was Audition, a Japanese horror movie recommended by a friend several years ago. It started a bit slow and was a touch confusing. It definitely fit into the “Japanese Horror Movie” mold. It was OK – if you really like Japanese horror, pick it up, otherwise I’d say it probably isn’t worth hunting down. If you have an empty Netflix queue might consider it.

The second movie, Tropic Thunder, was a blast. This movie has been out for a few weeks. We put off seeing it partially because of scheduling conflicts and laziness and partly to let the crowds die down. The movie was very funny and occasionally crude. I could easily imagine that the script was custom tailored for Jack Black and Robert Downy Jr, and Ben Stiller. If your easily offended, skip this one (but we loved it).

The missus completed the classroom portion of her scuba class and has done two of the three pool diving sessions. I think she is now feeling reasonably comfortable underwater and is looking forward to the third pool session and her open water dives. This is great because every day that passes is one day closer to our dives in Belize

A finished the book Little Brother. This is a book that everyone over the age of 15 should read. It is a scary, vivid, but easily believable portrait of a new future United States in folks like Bush remain in power. I don’t want to say much more, just go read the book. If your feeling cheap (or just want a taste), just download the book (free and legal).